Do you ever wonder how to teach students when to use ai or ay or 'a consonant e' (a-e) when spelling words or how to differentiate between homophones while spelling, e.g., plain vs. plane? This book helps students who struggle with spelling confusing long vowel spelling patterns to learn spellings by associating focus words to a fun storyline.

Train Trip To The Bay is the story of Fay, a young girl who takes the train to visit her friend, Den the Donkey, for a picnic at the bay. She has a few escapades on her way, but she reaches there safe and has a great day with her friend.

Train Trip To The Bay is a decodable resource focusing on 83 common words that use ONLY the ai and ay spelling patterns for the long sound of a /ā/. It is the first book in the Vowel Team Series. The book has been carefully authored to ensure that words with the long a sound /ā/ using spelling patterns other than the ai and ay, spelling patterns are NOT included in this book. This step has been taken to avoid confusion while students are becoming familiar with the focus words in this story.

The books in the vowel team series have been developed to help students with orthographic mapping of focus words. Every book in this Vowel Team Series focuses on one or two related vowel teams. It includes multiple target words spelled with the same spelling pattern that students of school age will encounter during reading and spelling.

Students with learning difficulties who struggle to differentiate the multiple spelling patterns of long vowel sounds will benefit from using this book. The intention is for children to associate the focus words with the story and subsequently become fluent in encoding and decoding those words.

The books come with educator resources that can be used in conjunction with this book to reinforce the spelling patterns covered in each book.